Sigh.

In 1912, The HMS Titanic as crossing the Atlantic and, during the night, an iceberg was spotted directly in the ship's path. Unfortunately those at the controls were pushing the ship faster than rationale given the conditions, and oblivious to the looming danger obscured in the darkness. By the time the iceberg was spotted, it was too late to change the course of the huge ship. Nevertheless, those in the bridge scrambled wildly to take action, some action. Since obviously blundering into the iceberg could not be the right thing to do...they HAD to take action! Well, they reversed engines and threw the ship hard to port, running the iceberg along the starboard side for a long distance and fatally wounding the ship. We all know what happened next. Modern analysis has determined that if they HAD done nothing, the ship would have taken a smart smack on the bow, but the flooding would have been limited to just the couple forward compartments and never threatened the ship. They could have limped into port.

I think the analogy above is clear (ship = economy, reckless speed = free credit, wheelhouse = regulators/gov't etc etc).

My point is, sometimes doing nothing IS better than taking drastic action for the sake of looking like you are taking action when the results down the road are far worse than what you are trying to prevent.

Sorry, TARP already wasted $700 billion and didn't work. Now we're talking another $800 billion PLUS the upcoming direct TARP-2 bailout of the banks and mortgage buy-back that has not been fully detailed yet but could run $1 trillion +!!!

I'd much rather take my chances on the free market correction and some pain now than a HUGELY expensive SERIES of bailouts now that give ZERO guarantees of accomplishing anything but virtually guaranteed fiscal disaster down the road. We can't pay our national debt down now, how are we supposed to do it in the future with this on top of the looming deficits in entitlement programs??